Nora moved far enough to see into the short passage behind the showroom. Cal stood between Hannah and the service door. Hannah had a folder beneath one arm.
“You said you'd collected things,” she told him. “Now you haven't got one thing to show me. I'm calling Mercer. Tell her where you collected them.”
She took out her phone. Cal pushed the bolt across the door. When she reached past him for it, he caught her wrist.
“Let go,” she said.
“I'm trying to show you.”
“You've shown me nothing.”
“Stop making it—”
Hannah pulled. Cal stepped forward, and she struck her shoulder against the wall. He wasn't simply preventing an argument from becoming rude. He was keeping her from leaving.
Nora backed behind the counter.
“It's Cal,” she told Mercer. “With Hannah. He's holding her. She wants to leave.”
Mercer's voice changed. “If there's immediate danger, call 999 now. Give them your showroom address and what you've just told me. I'm passing this on as well.”
Nora ended the call and dialled. She asked for police, gave the full London address, her name and the current threat. Her brother was holding a woman who was trying to get away. She had just reported a body in his storage unit to DI Mercer in Essex. She thought he might hurt them.
The call handler repeated the location. Nora confirmed it, described the front entrance and the service door and gave her number. She was told police were being sent. The instruction to stay safe was clear; she had no clear way to do it while Hannah remained in the passage.
“I need to go to her,” she said.
The handler was still speaking when Cal said Nora's name. He had seen her at the edge of the counter.
Nora put the phone down where the line remained open and went toward him, saying, “I've called the police.”
His face changed. Hannah looked at Nora, then pulled again.
“He said he had my father's things,” she said.
Cal's grip tightened. “I said I might.”
“You told me to come here.”
“I was trying to help.”
The words had been ordinary all week. Nora heard them in the passage while Hannah's wrist turned white beneath his hand.
“Let her go,” she said.
Cal looked at her injured arm, then her face. He was frightened. Nora knew the expression, the quick attention to every movement around him, the mouth trying to decide between anger and pleading.
“Tell them it's a misunderstanding.”
“Let her go.”
“She's asking me things I can't answer.”
Hannah stopped struggling for a moment. She looked past him at the service door, then down at the bolt he'd slid across it. Nora saw her noticing the route, measuring what lay between her and outside.
“Then say you can't,” Nora told him.
“You don't know what she asked.”
“It doesn't matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
He pulled Hannah farther into the room. She resisted, putting her free hand against the wall. Her folder fell. Prints slid out across the floor: clean, bright pieces of work, the things she'd brought to prove which folio she meant, still part of a day she had expected to manage.
“Don't,” Nora said.
Cal looked at the scattered paper. His mouth trembled with something which could have become laughter on another morning.
“Everything turns into a mess.”
“You're holding her.”
“I'm trying to keep us here until—”
“Until what?”
He looked at Nora. “Until you listen.”
She saw the cutting knife on the work surface beside him. Closed, where it might have been left after a job. He had not picked it up. The sight made the space between them narrower.
Nora stayed far enough away that he couldn't reach her without leaving Hannah. Her good hand was empty. She could not pretend she could pull him off another person with the arm which still hurt when she put a coat on.
“I'm listening,” she said. “Let her go and talk to me.”
Hannah looked at her sharply, then at Cal. She had heard the offer for what it was: a way to get his attention from her. Nora didn't want to promise him something she could not take back.
“We need to leave,” Cal said. “You and me. Before they make this something—”
“It is something.”
“You don't understand.”
Nora looked at the hand around Hannah's wrist. She could not give him the reassurance she used to give a frightened boy and ask Hannah to stand still while it worked.
“I went to the unit,” she said.
Cal stopped moving.
The words changed the room more completely than the phone call had. He looked at her bag behind the counter, at the open laptop, at her face. Now he knew she had done something he hadn't told her to do.
“What unit?” he said.
Nora kept her eyes on his.
“Your storage. I found Dominic.”